If you could add one thing to Vanilla Doom

[Super Jamie]

I had a search and couldn't find this discussed in the last 18 months or so, though it probably has been before.

If you could go back in time to 1993 and add one feature to DOOM.EXE, what would it be?



I wish there was an item that gave 25 armor. The options of giving the player 1/100/200 points are too limiting.

If you want to give the player 50 armor, you either need to spread pickups out over a large space, or wash the screen out with 50 helmets on top of each other.

[chungy]

Slopes, they'd make more interesting levels.

I think Build had slopes even at the time Doom was released (although that engine was still in its own infancy, so it's not like a game could be practically made with it yet).

EDIT: Nope, I'm wrong; Build was barely even started and slopes weren't added until 1995... http://advsys.net/ken/build.htm

[Enjay]

Super Jamie said:

I had a search and couldn't find this discussed in the last 18 months or so, though it probably has been before.

http://www.doomworld.com/vb/doom-general/45982-if-you-could-have-changed-one-thing-about-doom-what-would-it-have-been/

;)

[Graf Zahl]

MAPINFO.

The lack of any configurable game control mechnism has been the biggest shortcoming of the game and it still haunts us to this date because there's no standard for it.

[Super Jamie]

Enjay said:

http://www.doomworld.com/vb/doom-general/45982-if-you-could-have-changed-one-thing-about-doom-what-would-it-have-been/

Haha, damn, I thought I remembered something like this :P

[azureace]

Actually Keeping Visible Enemy Damage. Not to mention actually having it impact their methods and have the same thing for the player as well,

Like if the player is at 20% health or less have the screen get red tinted and the movement sluggish. and mess up response time for actions like push space to open the door but it doesn't happen for X amount of time.

[Enjay]

azureace said:

Like if the player is at 20% health or less have the screen get red tinted and the movement sluggish. and mess up response time for actions like push space to open the door but it doesn't happen for X amount of time.

Whilst that kind of thing does ad a bit of "realism" (and Strife does remove the ability to run when your health is low) it also has the frustration of the game deliberately making things harder for you right at the point where a mistake is most likely to get you killed anyway.

[myk]

Super Jamie said:
I wish there was an item that gave 25 armor. The options of giving the player 1/100/200 points are too limiting.

The armors work differently, so a megaarmor is worth more than twice what the normal armor is worth. Green armor increases your effective hit points by 50% while blue armor doubles it. I think that difference sets the two apart to make them sufficient. In addition, you don't need smaller units because, essentially, armor is just a form of "hit points" and health items already cover the few-point item function with the stimpak and the medikit. Any armor you pick up will outlast your base health by half its value, which explains why the smaller items are health items. You need to recover health while your armor still lasts. Any of the two armors will also last as much as the maximum allowed health.

[scalliano]

Scripting.

If the standard map functions won't perform a specific task, MAKE them!

[andrewj]

A sane way of adding new textures in pwads.

[gravitar]

ragdoll physics /jk

Actually, room over room or the possibility to freely bind any movement key or weapon on mouse/kb

[esselfortium]

Compatibility with KDiZD.

[hobomaster22]

This one's really hard as I don't think there is anything that really could have been changed. I mean the game was optimized to run on minimal hardware and crammed so tight. 4mb ram, no dedicated graphics processor, slow cpu, minimal hard disk space etc. I mean allocating memory was considered expensive at the time so they wrote their own memory allocator. Maybe the ability to jump, but I don't know the original source well enough as to how viable this would be.

But maybe I'm thinking about it too much as a developer. And too seriously :P.

[TimeOfDeath]

I agree with hobo, plus there are ports with new features these days anyway. All the limits and stuff are what makes vanilla doom vanilla doom.

But why did they not let players change the weapon keys?

[Abyssalstudios1]

I'd actually make monsters suffer from damaging sectors (lava, slime, and so on). For some reason, it's always really annoyed me that I can die on some green ooze, but a wimpy, easy gibbable zombieman can just keep on coming. Grrr.

[Csonicgo]

CONVEYOR BELTS.

[printz]

Make liquid act like liquid. I found it silly back then that landing on the green substance is like landing on fancy rippling cement.

[Technician]

Enjay said:

Whilst that kind of thing does ad a bit of "realism" (and Strife does remove the ability to run when your health is low) it also has the frustration of the game deliberately making things harder for you right at the point where a mistake is most likely to get you killed anyway.

I really liked how Doom 3 handled this. I really liked the quick blarts of red or the teeth and claw marks when hit. I can't remember off hand but did you also hear a heart beat when you hit low hp?

[Dragonsbrethren]

The game was already so beyond its time when it was released, I really can't think of anything it actually needed. I suppose a generalized line trigger system like Boom implemented instead of hardcoded trigger/action pairs would've helped the level design back then.

[GreyGhost]

Falling damage/death.

[fraggle]

Csonicgo said:

CONVEYOR BELTS.

Yes, my vote goes from conveyor belts, because you can use them to construct scripted sequences.

[Abrax]

Multitexturing... assigning a texture to the back of a 1 sided linedef, and it showing through with transparancy :o

[WH-Wilou84]

Maybe more stock decorative items with lots of frames, so that they could be used for Dehacked monsters later on :p

Also I'd have added more hit points to the Spider Mastermind, like 5000 instead of 3000, so that it could be more useful / dangerous and not wasted with one BFG9000 shot.

[neubejiita]

The DOOM alpha had conveyor textures and sort of information terminals, if all the alpha and DOOM bible stuff had been implemented it would have been quite a different game.

[Gez]

fraggle said:

Yes, my vote goes from conveyor belts, because you can use them to construct scripted sequences.

Why not actual scripts, then?

[Patrick]

The are 2 changes I would have made (you pick which one works better)

(1) Make loading custom resources to a wad easier. Using a program to merge your wad into an iwad is annoying; also who the fuck came up with the texture system?

or

(2) Scripting

[TheeXile]

Well I know a lot of things I would change, but intrinsically I'm not sure what I would want to add. Maybe proper scripting or a formal SDK or something...

[kristus]

Graf Zahl said:

MAPINFO.

The lack of any configurable game control mechnism has been the biggest shortcoming of the game and it still haunts us to this date because there's no standard for it.

This
But I would have also liked a more robust sprites in PWADS support.

[Snakes]

[WH]-Wilou84 said:

Also I'd have added more hit points to the Spider Mastermind, like 5000 instead of 3000, so that it could be more useful / dangerous and not wasted with one BFG9000 shot.

This, plus reduce it's pain chance so it's more resilient. And, as previously mentioned, generalized linedef actions would've made a nice addition.

[myk]

neubejiita said:
The DOOM alpha had conveyor textures and sort of information terminals, if all the alpha and DOOM bible stuff had been implemented it would have been quite a different game.

Yeah, but I've grown to appreciate the position Carmack held, versus Tom Hall's extra-feature idea. Without such a more fundamental design, the simplicity the game provides at its core would not have been possible except as an occasional curiosity. Simple things are delicate, and can be made nonviable with secondary functions and options. Now we can have that minimal base plus anything that can be added to source ports, alongside.

So if I were to go back to '93 in a time machine I'd be near the id offices for the development time, waiting to beat up and expel anyone else time-traveling to give the id guys any hindsight-acquired ideas :p